Improving Resilience Among Employees High in Depression, Anxiety, and Workplace Distress

Depression and anxiety are costly for both employees and employers, in terms of direct medical costs as well as costs stemming from lost productive time and missed days at work. Resilience training has been shown to improve workplace functioning for employees, which suggests that it is a promising avenue for reducing some of these costs. However, existing resilience trainings are often conducted in-person, suffer from low levels of engagement, and are difficult to scale to large groups of employees. In the current study, we compared change in resilience over time among employees who were assigned to and used an online resilience intervention platform (Happify), employees who were assigned to and used a scaled-down psychoeducational version of the platform, and employees who did not use their assigned platform (i.e., a no-usage comparison group). We did this separately for users high in emotional distress (clinical levels of depression and/or anxiety) and users high in workplace distress (high levels of presenteeism and/or burnout). Across both samples, employees who used the Happify platform showed significantly greater increases in resilience over eight weeks than employees in the two other groups; the latter two comparison groups did not differ significantly from each other. These findings suggest that a technology-based resilience intervention, which employs a low-touch, cost-effective, easily scalable intervention format, can successfully improve resilience among vulnerable employee groups, which may have important benefits in workplace settings.